Mind Over Ship (31 page)

Fred said, “Your house meet is here?” He had walked right past her thinking she was a park statue. Fred went back along the path to look at the retrogirl Kitty. Even up close it was hard to dispel the illusion. She wore the costume of a ballerina, with white tights and tutu, white slippers and ribbons, and a white tiara crowning her head. Her hair, skin, and nails were also white. Even the irises of her eyes were white. She was an alabaster statue, arms arched gracefully over her head, one leg bent slightly at the knee, most of her weight supported on her toes. Her trembling calf muscles broke the illusion, and Fred knew how much strength it took to hold such a pose. How could a child’s body have that much strength? She was the most enchanting thing he’d ever seen.

Sometime during the night, Meewee was awakened by the shaking of his bed. His first thought was—
Earthquake!
He opened his eyes to unfamiliar predawn walls. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember where he was, and this alarmed his half-asleep brain. The bed shook again. Not an earthquake but a gentle swaying, like the old-fashioned railway cars he’d traveled in as a boy.

Then he remembered where he was, in a guest cubby at the Mem Lab. Someone had told him—Director Koyabe?—that the lab was a collection of modules—large vehicles actually—that were constantly changing their locations deep underground.

Though he knew more or less where he was, he had no idea how long he’d been there. Weeks probably. It had been nonstop action since he’d arrived in his unusual tube car.

The car’s door had opened to a ceramic room. In his years of visiting the despotic regimes of tenuous nations, Meewee had encountered many similar rooms. They were called “frontier gates,” and were designed to frisk any visitor or cargo for hidden threat. Threats could then be neutralized by poison gas, fire, radiation, bullets, or whatever. When Meewee stepped from the car into the room, the doors shut and bolted behind him, and he spent a few uncomfortable minutes alone in the lethal room. Finally, the woman’s voice said, “We have confirmed your identity and LOG status. Please stand by, and an officer will escort you to my office.”

A moment later, a russ officer entered through a heavily armored hatchway. Though his uniform was new to Meewee, the russ, himself, seemed oddly familiar. Meewee followed him along corridors filled with onlookers in lab togs. These people loitered in doorways and intersections and either stared at him openly or welcomed him with enthusiastic greetings. The russ officer explained to Meewee that he was their first visitor since they went dark 432 days before, and that everyone was dying to hear his news.

By the time they reached their destination, a tiny office at the end of a corridor, Meewee had figured out the russ’s meaning. Eleanor’s yacht crash had occurred 432 days ago; this facility had been locked down and completely cut off from the world since then. At the office door, Meewee turned to his impromptu welcoming committee of lab workers and exclaimed, “She lives! Eleanor is alive!” He was answered by a wild cheer.

A woman came out of the office and said, “Which was it, the fish or the honeybees?”

“The fish,” Meewee said. “I don’t know anything about honeybees.”

“Come in, come in, and tell me everything.” She was a handsome woman, Asian, and no taller than he. She shook his hand with a firm grip. “I’m Dr. Koyabe, principal investigator and director of this facility, and you’ve just settled a major bet. Unfortunately, I was on the losing side.” Before closing her door, she spoke to those still in the corridor. “Don’t you have work to do? Go. Go.”

The director’s office was small, and towering crates of ugoo, food precursors, and other supplies made it smaller. Koyabe urged Meewee to make himself comfortable, but this was no time for comfort, and Meewee was anxious to issue his orders, but he paused to first make an ID challenge in Starkese.

She answered it and went on
And since we’re currently in Stealth Level 4, which is tighter than a null room, you can speak freely without it.>

“Your stealth status is the first thing to change,” Meewee replied in English. “Lift it to a level at which Cabinet and Arrow may communicate with you.”

Koyabe spoke to the room. “You hear that, Lab Rat?” To Meewee she added, “That’s our mentar.” She cocked her head while listening to its reply, and then went around to her desk. “Go ahead,” she said, and her mood sobered as Meewee recounted recent events. “I think,” she said to Meewee when he finished, “we had better go straight to the Command Post.”

They left the office, and Meewee followed her along the route he had arrived—the facility didn’t seem all that large—to an armored door. As Koyabe palmed the doorplate, she mused, “The fish, you say?”

THE “COMMAND POST” might have been another small office except that there was no desk. About a dozen chairs were arranged around the room facing the blank walls. Only one chair was occupied; a russ was working at an open wall frame. At first Meewee thought it was the same officer who had escorted him from the reception room, but he greeted Meewee as though for the first time.

Koyabe said, “Captain Benson is commander of the garrison here. Captain, this is LOG 1. On his authority I am placing the facility on red alert. Assemble a response team. Cabinet is LOG 2.”

Much happened at once. Dataframes and control panels opened along three walls, and lab workers streamed into the room to staff them. Cabinet soon appeared in the center of the room next to Meewee, and the lab workers stared at her and Meewee before returning their attention to their frames.

“You don’t recognize me, Cabinet, do you?” Koyabe said after she and Cabinet had exchanged ID challenges.

Meewee hastened to say

Koyabe said, still a little unsure. She turned to the captain and said, “Captain Benson, where’s my godseye?”

The russ captain was laboring at a framed map of the South Pacific. He answered her without turning. “The Starke network is too corrupted to use.”

“Then lurk me up a public view.”

At once, Meewee and the others in the middle of the room were standing
on the Stardust dance floor, a virtual ribbon of hardwood that circled the globe high above the equator. Couples and triads were waltzing in the airless space while others dined at tables along the edges. “Don’t worry,” Koyabe said as she led Meewee and Cabinet to the south side of the dance floor. “This is a pirated signal, and no one knows we’re here.” They peered over the edge at the South Pacific nine thousand meters below their feet.

“There,” Cabinet said, “and there.” Outlines of the six country-sized natpac panasonic pens were laid over the ocean, along with atmospheric metadata. “We need hydro data too, and water toxicity,” the mentar said. More layers appeared showing currents and temperatures, chemical analyses and O2 levels. Cabinet continued. “Eleanor’s last coherent thought was to order Arrow to cut open the pens and drive the fish out.”

“But we’ll lose them in the open ocean,” Koyabe said. “Won’t they scatter into separate schools?”

There was a shout of dismay from the bank of wall frames. On the ocean below, a purple splotch, like a spreading ink stain, appeared off the eastern coast of Natpac #3. Fortunately, the currents were pushing it north, and it looked like it would only graze the pen.

“What is that?” Koyabe said.

“Still analyzing,” said a staffer.

“Captain, have your team work up probable attack vectors. Put someone on ways to herd fish. Dr. Strohmeyer, are you ready?”

A woman’s voice answered. “I said it would be the fishes. I said the honey-bees were no good.”

“Yes, yes, and everyone knows you were right. Now, Marilyn, are you ready to begin transfer?”

“Almost. We have satellite coverage; my gear is spinning up. What medium should we use?”

“You have to ask? We’ll keep this fish to fish. Why tempt fate?” To Meewee she added, “Each competing memory technology has its champion. Dr. Strohmeyer is our fish czar.”

Meewee said, “You have panasonics here?”

“Better, a completely new species. I’ll show them to you later.”

Cabinet pointed to Natpac #3. “Arrow is in position to cut the fish loose. Is it safe to proceed?”

“No,” Koyabe said decisively. “Not until we know what that spill is. We can’t risk letting infected fish loose to endanger other pens.”

As she spoke, another purple splotch appeared on the ocean surface,
this one on a direct collision course with Natpac #6. And a third landed in the center of Natpac #5.

“What is that stuff, people?” Koyabe said, but no one had an answer.

Cabinet said, “You don’t need to worry about cross-contamination because all of the pens are being attacked.”

A frame opened next to Natpac #3 and displayed an anatomical diagram of what looked like an odd cross between a tadpole and a crab. “That’s it!” one of the response team members said.

Captain Benson read the specs. “The spills are concentrations of sea lice.”

“Sea lice?” Meewee said. “As in the biological pest, or some new godless mech?”

“The realbody parasite,” Benson replied. “Textrahine C.”

“What harm can they do?”

“Don’t underestimate sea lice, Bishop Meewee,” Koyabe said. “Even the natural variety can bedevil deep ocean fish to death. And the ‘C’ strain are super lice, developed during the Outrage as a weapon of bioterror. They spread quickly and can kill fish the size of panasonics in a few hours.”

Cabinet said, “How many hours?”

“Dr. Strohmeyer?”

The absent scientists said, “Sixteen to eighteen.”

“And how long will it take you to transfer Eleanor’s attention units once you have started?”

“Thirty to forty hours per pen. I can do two pens simultaneously.”

Cabinet said, “Can we track Eleanor’s fish once they’ve dispersed to open water?”

“Yes, but that means so can anyone else. Can you see them yet?”

On the ocean below, all the natpac pens except #5 turned a bright yellow tint. A team member said, “That’s Dr. Strohmeyer’s telemetry lock.”

“Yes, Marilyn, we can see them,” Koyabe said.

“Here is my recommendation,” Cabinet said. “Forget pen #5; she’s not there. Treat the other pens with anti-lice drugs to slow down the infestation. Assume that all of the pens will be attacked, and open them and disperse the fish to slow the rate of spread. Display the infestation spread and fish dispersal and transfer the affected fish first. We can stay ahead of this.”

Meewee nodded as he listened to Cabinet’s plan. It sounded about right. He noticed the others looking expectantly at him, and he remembered that he was LOG 1. “Are there any objections or counterproposals?” he said. Hearing none, he said, “Do it.” Almost at once Natpac #3 was leaking
streams of yellow dots from all sides. Soon, all of the pens were leaking except #5.

WITH A SWIPE of Koyabe’s hand, their perch on the Stardust dance floor on top of the world changed to a concrete room with dim lighting. “Don’t bump anything,” Koyabe warned him. “The Mem Lab uses two-way vurt. Anything you touch here gets touched there.”

“I’ll be careful,” Meewee promised.

Strohmeyer and five others in lab togs were at one side of the room coaxing a bank of instruments into service. Strohmeyer glanced at them and said, “Another fifteen minutes.” She was a large, disheveled woman, the opposite of the trim and neat Koyabe.

“Don’t let us disturb you,” Koyabe replied. “I’m showing our LOG the memory medium.” She led Meewee to the side of a large, rectangular steel pool filled with water. He looked in and was startled to see several dozen ghastly babies staring back at him from under the surface. Grim, ghoulish babies with grayish skin. He took a step back in surprise, and the babies turned as one and splashed away to deeper water at the other end of the pool.